With the developments of green technologies and the use of renewable resources such as wind and wave energy for provision of mains electricity more and more electrical network utilities are considering the use of such resources in the make-up of their electrical supply.
While these renewable resources have many advantages including their sustainability they suffer in their lack of consistent contribution to the overall make up of the network supply. For example wind generators can only provide energy when the wind is blowing and wave energy convertors require a wave pattern to provide power. Both of these have weather and climatic considerations which do not necessarily match the load requirements of the network.
As a result of the fluctuation in supply from these renewable energy resources the network operators typically also provide traditional sources of power when defining the overall make-up of the origination of the power. However these “carbon-based” power sources cannot typically be activated immediately and require time to come on-line to ensure the grid does not suffer from brown-outs or more critically complete lack of power. To ensure that there is sufficient power for the load at any one time, the predictable power supplies are typically always operated with the transient power that is available during the day from the renewable resources being used as available and as required. However where the available power from such resources exceeds the load on the network the network utility operator will typically discard that energy by deactivating the wind turbine or the like in preference to stopping the predictable power supply. This load management dilemma results in not all available power from the renewable resource being utilised.
Different solutions have been considered for such problems including those generally considered as grid energy storage where electrical energy is stored during times when production (from power plants) exceeds consumption and the stores are utilized at times when consumption exceeds production. Considered solutions contemplate powering batteries for electrical vehicles, compressing air and use of flywheels. All of these while useful in addressing the variances in the load thereby improving efficiency and decreasing energy losses require a conversion to a energy storing mains electricity grid which represents a very costly solution.
There is therefore a problem in management of such network loads to ensure that the use of renewable resources within a network grid can be optimised.